(PS10-B48) The Socio-ecological Impact of COVID-19 on Child and Parent Emotional Well-being

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting the well-being of billions of children and their families. Child and parent emotional well-being is influenced by multiple socio-ecological factors, including individual characteristics, interpersonal relationships, and community resources and stressors. Effective disease prevention and health promotion efforts require integrated assessment of these multi-level factors. However, the effects of COVID-19 on the individual, interpersonal, and community factors that bolster family well-being remains unknown. Without an adequate analysis of this broad impact, we may overlook salient risk factors, ultimately reducing the effectiveness of public health policy and strategy. This study investigates the effects of COVID-19 on child and parent emotional well-being across individual, interpersonal, and community levels of analysis.

Methods: Participants were 487 parents (37% female) aged 24 to 68 years (M = 35.68, SD  = 8.04) with a child between ages 5 and 12 years (M = 7.85, SD = 2.39) recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a crowdsourcing platform. Parents completed a single assessment between September 29 and October 12, 2021 on child and parent emotional well-being, individual (child age, gender, ethnicity), interpersonal (family COVID-19 illness, personal impact of COVID-19, supportive parenting), and community (vaccination rate, infection rate, childcare access, healthcare access) factors.

Results: Each group of individual, interpersonal, and community factors were entered into step-wise regression analyses to predict child and parent well-being. Results indicated that individual, F(3, 454) = 10.49, p < .001 and interpersonal, F(5, 449) = 100.28, p < .001, but not community, F(4, 445) = 2.32, p = .056, factors were associated with child well-being. In the final step of the model, older child age, b = 0.23, t(457) = 2.09, p = .037, sr² = .01, lower personal impact, b = -0.45, t(457) = 15.02, p < .001, sr² = .34, more supportive parenting, b = 0.10, t(457) = 3.18, p = .002, sr² = .02, and no delay in healthcare, b = -1.60, t(457) = 2.54, p = .012, sr² = .01, were associated with higher levels of child well-being. The full model accounted for 57% of the variance in child well-being, F(12, 457) = 48.60, p < .001, R² = .57.

In the model predicting parent well-being, individual, F(3, 455) = 12.76, p < .001 and interpersonal, F(5, 450) = 146.60, p < .001, but not community, F(4, 446) = 1.10, p = .36, factors predicted additional variance. In the final step of the model, older child age, b = 0.44, t(458) = 2.95, p = .003, sr² = .02, lower personal impact, b = 0.56, t(458) = 13.85, p < .001, sr² = .30, and more supportive parenting, b = 0.55, t(458) = 13.44, p < .001, sr² = .29, were associated with higher levels of parent well-being. The final model accounted for 64% of the variance in parent well-being, F(12, 458) = 69.81, p < .001, R² = .65.

Conclusions: This study points to the importance of addressing the multi-level factors influencing family well-being, particularly child age, personal impact, and supportive parenting, to best understand the effects of COVID-19.